The Soundiron Snow Drums are a percussion library designed for glitch, experimental and modern composition. The sounds were created entirely with the use of snow and a frozen pond. The snow and ice sounds have been edited, programmed and arranged to create percussive playability and organized logically to allow easy use as sound effects source material.

The snow instruments include a variety of ice and snow foley, using prepared and natural snow piles, ice blocks and frozen ponds. The Wintry pond instruments were created by recording a variety of stones, ice chunks and pebbles skittering over the surface of a large frozen pond in a narrow canyon, high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. The results are quite surprising, as the sound waves travel over the ice and off of the canyon walls in very unusual ways. As the stones bounce away from the listening position, across the ice to the far side of the pond, the impacts take on a spring-like Doppler effect. We were on a little day trip during the holidays when we stopped by the pond for a rest and discovered this cool natural sonic effect, just by chance.

While this library is best suited for use by sound designers and sfx artists, the instrument programming should nonetheless allow for very unique and responsive playability as percussion and musical elements. You may hear the sound of winter wind and other impurities in the background, due to the location of this frozen pond we found. This was unavoidable and we think the sounds are cool enough to ignore any minor flaws. All in all, this strange source material is quite interesting, creatively useful and rather musical. They also make very interesting impulse responses when used in convolution reverb plug-ins.

511 Samples (standard PCM wav).

16 .nki files (unlocked format).

161 MB installed.

Native Instruments Kontakt version 3.5 or 4 full retail version of Kontakt required to use all .nki instrument program presets included in this library. The free Kontakt "Player" does not support this library.